How Dumb Can You Be and Still Get a Seat in the U.S. House?

My mother and her parents — my grandparents — left their village in the Ukraine in 1921, then spent two years in a barn on the outskirts of Odessa waiting for papers and tickets which allowed them in 1923 to come and enter the United States.

They weren’t Holocaust survivors because the Nazi war machine didn’t reach the area where they had lived in Ukraine until 1942. The reason they ran from the village in 1921 was because the village was the site of a murderous pogrom during which my grandmother saw her father — my great-grandfather — shot dead in street.

In other words, my family history makes me somewhat sensitive to anti-Semitism, as Grandpa would say ‘vishtais?’ (read: understand).

I just finished watching the House vote to throw Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee for remarks she has made about the influence of Jewish donations in American politics, as well as comments in which she refers to Israel’s West Bank strategy as ‘genocide’ and an attempt to sow anger and distrust between Muslims and Jews.

Omar has also made some not-so insidious comments about how Jewish political donations to Members of the House are used to promote not just support of Israel, but also used to create a ‘dual loyalty’ of the recipients of this money both to America and to the…